Thursday, September 29, 2016

Well, Chris Vickery and I tried to warn everyone about
making these lists public and not securing them better. Now we see this, by Nicole Rojas:

During a House Judiciary
Committee hearing on Wednesday (28 September), FBI Director James Comey
revealed hackers have attempted to hack into voter registration sites in more
than a dozen states and on several occasions. Investigators believe Russia is behind the
attempted hacks, officials said.

“There have been a variety of
scanning activities which is a preamble for potential intrusion activities as
well as some attempted intrusions at voter database registrations beyond those
we knew about in July and August,” Comey said.

Fear of hackers reading private
e-mails in cloud-based systems like Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, or Yahoo has
recently sent regular people and public officials scrambling to delete entire
accounts full of messages dating back years. What we don’t expect is our own government to
hack our e-mail — but it’s happening. Federal court cases going on right now are
revealing that federal officials can read all your e-mail without your
knowledge. For example, in the case of U.S. v. Ravelo, pending in Newark, New
Jersey, the government used a search
warrant to download the entire contents of a lawyer’s personal cellphone
– more than 90,000 items including text messages, e-mails, contact lists, and
photos. When the phone’s owner
complained to a judge, the government argued it could look at everything (except for privileged lawyer-client communications)
before the court even issued a ruling. The
judge in Ravelo is expected to issue a preliminary ruling on the feds’
arguments sometime in October. All
Americans should be watching carefully to what happens next in these cases –
the government may be already watching you without your knowledge.

The theme of the course was to take a number of security
events that illustrated various attacks I'd covered in the ethical hacking
series and talk through some of the mechanics. Deconstruct them, if you like. These are real world security events so this
is far from hypothetical, it's things that have actually happened. Here's what we cover:

Australian Attorney-General
George Brandis has said the government will introduce legislation to amend
the Privacy Act for the purposes of protecting anonymised
datasets that are collected and published by the Commonwealth.

Claiming that the “privacy of
citizens is of paramount importance” to the government, Brandis said the
amendment, which will be introduced in the coming months during the spring
sittings of Parliament, will criminalise the re-identification of de-identified
data.

HackerOne helps you find vulnerabilities in your
internet-facing systems. We do it
through a unique model where we have a community of researchers and hackers
around the world who will hack you on
your request and they will send you a report outlining what they
found. You send them money as a thank you if the report was useful. [Or, we
could help ourselves…Bob]If it wasn’t, you pay nothing.

My Software Architecture students will be looking for Research
Projects. I thought I’d list a few
potential areas here.

American Airlines Group Inc., nearly three years after
merging with US Airways, faces a major information-technology challenge this
weekend (Sept. 30-Oct.1), when it transitions all pilots and planes to one
“flight operating system.”

Every day, humans type out more than 200 billion emails,
hundreds of millions of tweets, and innumerable texts, chats, and private
messages. No one person could pick
through even a tiny sliver of this information and stitch together themes and
trends—but computers are starting to be able to. For more than a decade, researchers have been
developing computer programs that can ingest enormous amounts of writing to try
and understand the emotions stirred up by an idea or a product.

…The group's goal
is to create the first industry-led consortium that would also include academic
and nonprofit researchers, leading the effort to essentially ensure AI's
trustworthiness: driving research toward technologies that are ethical, secure
and reliable — that help rather than hurt — while also helping to diffuse fears
and misperceptions about it.

"We plan to discuss, we plan to publish, we plan to
also potentially sponsor some research projects that dive into specific
issues," Banavar says, "but foremost, this is a platform for open discussion
across industry."

…The results,
which are based on an online survey of 1,119 U.S. customers, estimates that
pay-TV providers could lose about $1,248 per cord-cutter annually. That’s because the average cord-cutter saves
$104 a month—about 56% of their bill—from dropping cable TV.

Deutsche Bank can only be saved by the German government,
strategist says

Only a substantial intervention by the German government
can stop the collapse of the country's largest lender, Deutsche Bank, according to Stefan Müller,
the CEO of Frankfurt-based boutique research company DGAW.

"Deutsche Bank doesn't realize that something serious
needs to happen," he told CNBC via telephone on Thursday morning. "(CEO John) Cryan clearly showed that he
has no idea how to survive."

Last year I published a 30 page document that I called The Practical
Ed Tech Handbook. This week I spent
some time revising that document and updating it the 2016-17 school year. The Practical
Ed Tech Handbook isn't just a list of my favorite resources. I've included ideas for using these resources
and in many cases I've included links to video tutorials about my favorite
resources.

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.